EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsLONDON -- It is nine years since Harry Kane lingered at the back of the London Palladium at the end of a soccer awards show.The Best FIFA Football Awards in 2017 had just concluded with Cristiano Ronaldo handed the Men's top prize in addition to leading a team of the year including Lionel Messi, Neymar, Sergio Ramos and Gianluigi Buffon.As the audience filed out and a few mere mortals loitered in the hope of a selfie, Kane stood near the exit, casting a longing stare at the winners on stage. He has dreamed all his life of being in their place, considered in the same breath as the game's greats.On Monday, at the same storied West End venue, about nine miles from his birthplace in Leytonstone, he finally is. Sat next to Lamine Yamal with last year's winner Rodri one place further away, Kane kept company with the elite. And then he joined them.Last week in Munich, he told reporters he had found the wait to learn the winner "very stressful" for himself and his family. The final few hours on Monday won't have helped. The rain present earlier in the day subsided, but the controversy did not.Less than three hours before the ceremony was due to start, the official website published a profile of Kane as the 2026 Ballon d'Or winner. Alongside one for Kylian Mbapp and Yamal. They were swiftly deleted. The entire ceremony was then delayed by 45 minutes with no official reason given, amid some speculation that the notorious London traffic was responsible.Kane won on the undercard -- the "Gerd Mller Men's Award" or the "Striker of the Year" -- to cheers from the locals in the audience. The raucous reaction from the cheap seats before addressing the crowd was a prelude to what followed. It was palpably welcome but not, by itself, an indication of the big one: Striker of the Year is not decided by vote, but simply by goals, and Kane's 73 was the best in the men's game.Having waited for over a decade to live this moment, a few extra minutes made no difference in the end."Wow, wow, wow," he said after taking the stage before thanking Tottenham Hotspur by saying "I wouldn't be where I am without you" in a moment of typical class.Monday's Ballon d'Or triumph is the crowning moment for a player whose story of relentless professionalism and determined aspiration serves as an exemplar for any young player. British media is often criticized for prematurely building up players to an impossible level, only to then knock them down when that level is inevitably never reached.Kane has always been a different case. He publicly judged himself against Ronaldo and Messi, two of the best in history, and used their devastating consistency as a target to match.His numbers since joining Bayern Munich are staggering: 158 goals in 156 matches following a 120 million move from Tottenham in 2023. The Ballon d'Or voting period takes into account August 2025 to the end of the World Cup in July.He scored 73 goals in 65 matches during that period, won the Bundesliga, the DFB-Pokal, the German Supercup and led England to their best FIFA World Cup finish in 60 years with third place, scoring six times at the tournament.Back in 2017, "The Best" awards were a competition set up by FIFA as a rival to the Ballon d'Or after five years of partnership with organizers France Football had come to an end. Kane was on the 24-man shortlist for Best Men's Player that year. He finished 24th. Of course, his journey to the summit began much further back.Coming through the Spurs academy, a young Kane had loan spells at Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich City and Leicester City, where you would find it extremely difficult to locate anyone honest who genuinely believed at the time they were in the presence of a future world-class talent. A nice kid, sure, a hard-worker with a future in the game. But one of England's greatest?Kane broke into Spurs' first team towards the end of the 2013-14 season and a year later was named PFA Young Player of the Year aged 21, making his England debut in the same season. He marked that moment against Lithuania with a goal then, too.Fame was a novelty at this point. During a Tottenham preseason tour to Sydney, Kane innocently ventured out to a shopping center in his downtime. He was quickly mobbed by so many adoring fans that the club had to scramble a minibus to bring him back to the team hotel.Kane went on to score 280 goals in 435 appearances for Spurs while breaking Wayne Rooney's all-time goalscoring record for England. Barring injury, he will break Peter Shilton's appearance record of 125 caps next month too.There was, though, perhaps a sense in the build-up that Kane was not quite the global superstar his Ballon D'Or rivals were, most obviously Messi and Mbapp but also, despite his teenage years, Yamal, named Young Talent of the Year for the third consecutive year.Former Spurs boss Jose Mourinho alluded to this in a conversation with Kane captured by Amazon in their "All or Nothing" series covering the 2019-20 campaign."The world looks to English football with an incredible respect but they still think that the movie stars of football belong to other places -- and I think we have to build also your status in that direction," he said.Kane replied: "That's my aim. When you are at a club like Tottenham, of course we've done well, personally I've done well, but I want to be Ronaldo, Messi..."There he goes again. The Ballon d'Or is voted for by one journalist per country of FIFA's top 100 ranked nations, which brings a different dynamic to, say, the FIFA equivalent, which adds votes from national managers and captains.He had never finished higher than 10th in the Ballon d'Or vote (2024). There are three criteria, listed in order of importance: individual performances, decisive and impressive character; collective performances and titles won; class and fair play.And despite the Premier League being one of the United Kingdom's most successful global exports, English players have only ever won it five times (Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Bobby Charlton and Kevin Keegan twice) and nobody has triumphed since Michael Owen in 2001.That's more than two decades of unprecedented growth for the Premier League, and yet LaLiga often feels as though it is where the true individual talents reside. Players from Real Madrid and Barcelona have won it 12 times each. Manchester United are the most successful English club in Ballon d'Or history with four.Kane, of course, left England in pursuit of silverware after a decade of personal achievement but collective frustration at Spurs. In doing so, he has ended up landing both silverware with Bayern and now the highest individual honor a player can attain."I am almost speechless," he said. "Being here in London has made it extra special. It made it a good omen for me tonight." Instead of staring at the Palladium stage, now all eyes are on him.
